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Science & Roger Penrose Webinar Science & ROGER PENROSE Live Webinar - hosted by the Center for Consciousness Studies August 3 – 6, 2021 9:00 am – 12:30 pm (PST/AZ) each day 4 Online Live Sessions DAY 1 Tuesday August 3, 2021 9:00 am to 12:30 pm PST Overview / Black Holes SIR ROGER PENROSE (Nobel Laureate) Oxford University, UK Tuesday August 3, 2021 9:00 am – 10:30 am PST Roger Penrose was born, August 8, 1931 in Colchester Essex UK. He earned a 1st class mathematics degree at University College London; a PhD at Cambridge UK, and became assistant lecturer, Bedford College London, Research Fellow St John’s College, Cambridge (now Honorary Fellow), a post-doc at King’s College London, NATO Fellow at Princeton, Syracuse, and Cornell Universities, USA. He also served a 1-year appointment at University of Texas, became a Reader then full Professor at Birkbeck College, London, and Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics, Oxford University (during which he served several 1/2-year periods as Mathematics Professor at Rice University, Houston, Texas). He is now Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor, Fellow, Wadham College, Oxford (now Emeritus Fellow). He has received many awards and honorary degrees, including knighthood, Fellow of the Royal Society and of the US National Academy of Sciences, the De Morgan Medal of London Mathematical Society, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, the Wolf Prize in mathematics (shared with Stephen Hawking), the Pomeranchuk Prize (Moscow), and one half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, the other half shared by Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez. He has designed many non-periodic tiling patterns including a large paving at entrance of Andrew Wiles Mathematics Building, Oxford, and the Transbay Center, San Francisco, California. Sir Roger is widely acclaimed for fundamental advances in understanding the universe. His 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was bestowed for showing that black holes are robust predictions of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Roger has also proposed a solution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics (‘objective reduction’, ‘OR’), which he suggests is also the origin of consciousness, leading to a theory of brain function (‘orchestrated objective reduction’, ‘Orch OR’). And Roger’s concept of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (‘CCC’) posits a serial, eternal universe, with the Big Bang preceded by a previous aeon which had its own Big Bang, that aeon preceded by another and so on. The webinar will cover these 4 major inter- related areas of Roger’s work. Consciousness, Consciousness, Quantum State Reduction, Black Holes, and Conformal Cyclic Cosmology Roger Penrose Three lecture courses, attended by me in the early 1950s (not part of my official PhD topic in algebraic geometry) had a profound influence on my later research: Steen, on mathematical logic, Bondi, on general relativity, and Dirac on quantum mechanics. Steen showed, in effect, via Gödel’s theorem and Turing Machines, why conscious understanding could not be computational. Bondi conveyed the beauty and over- arching framework of general relativity. Dirac demonstrated the, power and elegance of quantum mechanics for small-scale activity, yet with its underlying conundrum of quantum measurement. Over many years of worrying¬—and eventually with the key input of microtubules from Hameroff—a plausible picture of how an explanation of a non-computational consciousness might perhaps emerge. This required a better view of how general relativity would have to fit in with quantum mechanics. A basic question arises from the inevitability of space-time singularities in classical gravitational collapse into what we now call black holes. Yet the quantum measurement issue cannot be divorced from the nature of these singularities, particularly in view of a gross time-asymmetry in relation to the extraordinarily special nature of the big-bang singularity—deeply related to the origin of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The picture of conformal cyclic cosmology arises as a natural outcome of this line of thinking—a scheme which appears now to be receiving increasing observational support. REINHARD GENZEL (Nobel Laureate) Max Planck Institute | UC Berkeley Tuesday August 3, 2021 10:30 am – 11:15 am PST Reinhard Genzel, born 1952 in Bad Homburg v. d. H., Germany, is one of the Directors of Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Professor in the Graduate School of the University of California, Berkeley and an Honorary Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. He is a Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. His research interests include astrophysics of galactic nuclei, star formation, kinematics and cosmic evolution of galaxies, massive black holes and experimental infrared, submillimeter and millimeter astronomy. He has received numerous honours and awards, including the Shaw Prize of The Shaw Prize Foundation and the Crafoord Prize in Astronomy. In 2020, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Andrea Ghez, for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy. A 40-Year Journey Reinhard Genzel More than one hundred years ago, Albert Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity (GR). One year later, Karl Schwarzschild solved the GR equations for a non-rotating, spherical mass distribution; if this mass is sufficiently compact, even light cannot escape from within the so-called event horizon, and there is a mass singularity at the center. The theoretical concept of a ‘black hole’ was born, and was refined in the next decades by work of Penrose, Wheeler, Kerr, Hawking and many others. First indirect evidence for the existence of such black holes in our Universe came from observations of compact X-ray binaries and distant luminous quasars. I will discuss the forty- year journey, which my colleagues and I have been undertaking to study the mass distribution in the Center of our Milky Way from ever more precise, long term studies of the motions of gas and stars as test particles of the space time. These studies show the existence of a four million solar mass object, which must be a single massive black hole, beyond any reasonable doubt. ROGER BLANDFORD Stanford University Tuesday August 3, 2021 11:15 am – 12:00 noon PST Roger Blandford took his BA, MA and PhD degrees at Cambridge University. Following postdoctoral research at Cambridge, Princeton and Berkeley he took up a faculty position at Caltech in 1976 where he was appointed as the Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics in 1989. In 2003, He moved to Stanford University to become the first Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology and the Luke Blossom Chair in the School of Humanities and Science. His research interests include black hole astrophysics, cosmology, gravitational lensing, cosmic ray physics and compact stars. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2008-2010, he chaired a two year National Academy of Sciences Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics. He was awarded the 1998 Dannie Heineman Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the 2013 Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, the 2016 Crafoord Prize for Astronomy and the 2020 Shaw Prize for Astronomy. He co-authored with Kip Thorne the textbook Modern Classical Physics. Black Holes - Nature or Nurture?: The Roles of Rotation and Accretion in Powering Cosmic Sources Roger Blandford In 1969, Roger Penrose argued that the existence of negative energy orbits of test particles within the ergosphere implies that it is possible to extract rotational energy from a spinning black hole. There is now substantial observational evidence that astrophysical black holes release rotational energy through a related process involving electromagnetic field and that this powers relativistic jets. Recent observations, including those from the Event Horizon Telescope, will be discussed in these terms and it will be argued that black hole spin has an even larger role than usually advertised in powering cosmic sources. Discussion 12:00 noon – 12:30 pm Science & ROGER PENROSE Live Webinar - hosted by the Center for Consciousness Studies DAY 2 Wednesday August 4, 2021 9:00 am to 12:30 pm PST QUANTUM MEASUREMENT – OBJECTIVE REDUCTION (OR) IVETTE FUENTES-GURIDI University of Southampton, UK Wednesday August 4, 2021 9:00 am – 9:45 am PST Prof. Ivette Fuentes–Guridi is a theoretical physicist working at the University of Southampton, UK. She has led research in a number of topics, including quantum information, quantum optics, quantum metrology, quantum communications and, in particular, in the overlap of these topics with relativity. She pioneered Relativistic Quantum Information, a field that studies the effects of relativity on the processing of quantum information. Experimentalists have verified her earlier, often controversial, work on photon entanglement during detector free-fall, the generation of multipartite entanglement and quantum gates in superconducting circuits and the effects of the vacuum field on geometric phases. She obtained her PhD at Imperial College, London and has held several prestigious fellowships, including a Career Acceleration Fellowship (EPSRC), a Humboldt Fellowship at TU Berlin and Glasstone, and Junior Research Fellowships at Mansfield College, Oxford. Exploring the unification of quantum theory and general relativity with a Bose-Einstein condensate Ivette Fuentes-Guridi The unification of quantum theory and general relativity remains one of the most important open issues in fundamental physics. A main problem is that we are missing experimental input at scales where quantum and relativistic effects coexist. Developing instruments sensitive at these scales might also help answer other big questions, such as the nature of dark energy and dark matter. In this talk I will show how Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) could be used to search for clues. A single BEC in a superposition of two locations could test if gravity induces the collapse of the wavefunction.
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